Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

ARMED ISLAMIC GROUP • 45The third strategy began in August 1993 with attacks on Frenchdiplomats and citizens in Algeria. After kidnapping three Frenchconsular officials, the GIA gave the last hostage a scrawled messageto deliver upon his release: “Foreigners, leave the country. We giveyou one month.” The implicit message was that France and other nationsthat supported the Algerian regime would pay with the blood oftheir own citizens. By December 1995 the GIA had killed over 100foreigners, most of them French and none of them American. Franceretaliated with a crackdown in November 1993, arresting 88 peopleknown to have ties to the FIS.The fourth strategy was to bring the war home to France. Thiswas done dramatically with the hijacking of an Air France AirbusA300 from Algiers on 24 December 1994, the second anniversary ofthe invalidated national election. The plane was flown to Marseilleswhere, after three passengers were murdered, the French SpecialForces stormed the plane, killing all four hijackers and freeing theremaining 171 passengers. About 20 sticks of dynamite were foundon board with which the hijackers had planned to explode the planewhile in flight over Paris, raining plane fragments and human bodiesover the French capital.To bring the war to France more dramatically, the GIA pursued abombing campaign centered on Paris. On 25 July 1995 a bomb explodedin the Paris Metro, killing seven and injuring 17. The series ofbombings that followed injured up to 150 people by October.The killings, bombings, and massacres involved not only GIA andAIS attacks on government officials, soldiers, and police, but alsothe targeting of entire villages of Algerian Muslims. It must also benoted that the Algerian government and pro-government paramilitarygroups engaged in massive reprisals involving mass executions ofjailed militants as well as entire villages viewed as sympathetic tothe Islamists. This eight-year insurgency of 1992–2000 recalled thepolitical violence and social division of the earlier Algerian war ofindependence of 1954–1962. A brief chronology of some of the morenotable events follows, which is more of a representative than a comprehensiveand complete summary of the violence of this period.On 27 December 1994 the GIA murdered four Roman Catholicpriests in reprisal for the killing of its four hijackers, an action orderedby Abu Abdulrahman Amin, who was the purported amir, orcommander, of the GIA. During 1995 the GIA exploded at least two